976 Evil - Stephen Geoffreys is at his best again, this time as Hoax, a dweeb who has a dominant and very religious mother. He adores his cousin Spike, who does everything that is forbidden to him: ride a motorbike, smoke cigarettes, go out with girls and gamble with cards. When he finds a flyer of call service 976-EVIL, he gives it a shot hoping to have some fun, but it goes out of hand and soon he can't control the demonic powers anymore. This 80s horror, directed by Robert Englund has all the nice ingredients: weird haircuts, gore, strange outfits and great music. Atmosphere is great, acting is nice: apart from Geoffreys, Sandy Dennis is great as his mom. The subplot with the detective was not something this film really needed, it felt a bit out of place. Overall this didn't become one of the classics and I can see why, but it does have potential. Horrorfans with a weak spot for the 80s won't be disappointed.

Blood Reaper - low budget slasher and it shows: bleak imagery, bad acting and a short appearance of Brinke Stevens, who is big on the cover but dies after some 8 minutes. The story is extremely unoriginal, so I'll just give you some keywords: campers, forest, cabin, killer. You must have an idea of the plot now The gore is actually quite OK, but the film is pretty boring overall so I started doing other stuff while it kept running in the background. It has some nice bad movie aspects going on (the killer chasing a guy into half a wooden shed which only consists of two walls but still they try to enter thorugh the door only), but it doesn't save the movie from being pretty forgettable.

Graduation Day - bought this one after watching Screaming in High Heels, because it has a young Linnea Quigley in it. It's a mediocre slasherlike movie of which you will know the plot just by reading the backside of the DVD. The story is simple, a guy takes revenge after his girlfriend has died during an athletic match. His targets are the other members of the track team and so they start dying one by one. The kills themselves make this film stand out a tad from the average thriller, but otherwise this film is not very spectacular. Somehow this title rang a bell with me, so I had some expectations regarding this being a classic of some sorts, but I was a bit disappointed in seeing this never really rise from the swamp of mediocrity.

Bleed - Debbie Rochon plays Maddy, who gets hired for a job in an office where the guy who hired her also becomes her new boyfriend. When onm a party together, Maddy hears about their secret society, the "Murder club" and feeling very alone and traumatised by her youth in a superreligious family, she will do anything to be able to join the club. It's quite obvious what she has to do, but then the members of the club start to die one by one. It's up to the viewer to decide who is this killer offing all friends in various ways. Kind of shallow slasher, with short appearances of Brinke Stevens and Julie Strain (who is literally dead after a minute). Guessing the killer is not as easy as you might think, but unfortunately that doesn't make this a good film. Several scenes get shown twice, the second time as flashes inside the mind of a character (inluding the minute with Strain, I guess to get the most out of it). Apart from the kills nothing really happens, it never becomes clear what kind of a job Maddy actually took on in "the office", the friends seem to have nothing else to do then sit in a pool or drink together and talk. Maybe this will be a cult classic in twenty years, but at the moment this doesn't tingle my horrorsenses at all.

Haunting Fear - a Fred Olen Ray film about a woman (Brinke Stevens) who has recurring nightmares in which she dreams that she is dead, or that she is buried alive. Her husband has an affair with his secretary and while he tries to send his wife to a doctor and pay his huge debts to a mafioso, the secretary comes up with a plan to solve both problems at once. Surprise: it involves murder. Bad luck for them: the plan seems to succeed, but does not quite do so. The first 75% of the film are rather boring, only the nightmares are interesting, especially in the beginnig when you don't know yet which is dream and which isn't. The finale is nice and then the gore starts too. I must say that John Henry Richardson actually did quite an OK job on his acting, as he had top keep up appearances with his wife while he was falling hard for the secretary. OK film, nice passtime, nothing really special though.

Deadly Embrace - David DeCoteau flick, no horror. Michelle Bauer is the lonely rich woman whose husband is cheating on her and she begins an affair with the boy they hired to do chores round teh house. Linnea Quigley is his unsuspecting girlfriend who comes over to visit one day and then things get out of hand. Lots of unfunctional nudity and a very thin storyline.

Boarding House - aka Bad Force. Jim inherits a big house which is said to be haunted: several deaths occurred there in the past. Jim doesn't know that yet so he invites tenants, they are all girls between 18 and 25 years old (because that's what Jim put in the ad). He has lots of fun and parties with them, but then strange things start happeing: at first some girls just hurt themselves to stray knives etc, but when a girl disappears and is found dead on the beach by the police, things start to turn ugly. Lots of nudity and buckets of cheap blood, the "soecial effects" are really bad and the director using intruding colour filters doesn't help, it doesn't even conceal how bad those effects are The kills are OK, the final scene is funny and actually fits pretty well into the story. I had fun with tis B-movie, don't expect too much and you'll be fine.

Harpoon - aka Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre. A group of tourists go on a whale watching trip, but they are out of luck: no whales to be found, so they head out to sea further and then in a string of events the captain is taken out and his helping hand leaves the boat in a dinghy. The tourists are opicked up by a bunch of locals, but they don't have nice plans in store for them. I thought this would be a nice change of oace from the regular slashers you get to see with American teens or prom queens or anything. Unfortunately, the Icelandic character of the film is lacking a bit. The tourists are quite obnoxious people and you are hoping they will die painful deaths (which they do in several cases), only a few are people you would actually want to meet. The ending is OK, how it turns out in the final scene has a little twist which is nice, but nothing really surprising. Gore is pretty good, some deaths are really gross. Overall I would say that it's OK, but if you have a choice chances are you also have something better to watch.

976 Evil II - almost no connection with part one, ecept for the Spike character, a few phones ringing and two of those cards. It's all very thin, and that's because this is actually a whole different story. It's about a dean who can do astral projections and his astral body kills off loads of people. The police thinks he can't be the guy because he is in jail already, but Spike and a blonde girl (well, for 80% the girl) try to catch him anyway. The kills are fun, there is enough gore and also some nudity, but the plot is so superficial that it is almost embarassing. I guss this is one of those films which gave sequels their bad rep. You might have fun with this one if you like B-movies.

Murder Weapon - David DeCoteau directed this one under the pseudonym Ellen Cabot. It features Linnea Quigley, his muse, and Karen Russell, two grils born of mafioso families. Used to violence and crime, they kill a guy who is visiting their house, and after they have served some time they arrange a party for all their former boyfriends with the plan of taking them all out (and not to dinner, haha). One by one the guys meet their demise and some of those kills are rather gory. Acting is below par and the storyine is yet again as shallow as they come. Some tits of course to make the list of DeCoteau cliches complete and off you go. An OK watch for if you have some 85 minutes to kill, but as with all flicks as of late, you might wanna take your chance with something else.

Bad Girls from Mars - a Fred Olen Ray film about low budget filmmaking. On the set of a scifi flick the lead actresses keep dying, so when the fourth has passed on, the director gets a new starlet thrown into his lap by the producer. This woman is an elite prostitute from Europe and while the director picks her up from the airport, she changes outfit twice on the drive to their get together. When she finds out about her predecessors, she starts defending herself, and thus the film, from a similar demise. This is more a comedy than anything else, and although I have seen several B-movies about making B-movies, this one made me laugh several times. It spoofs the filmindustry, but also the low budgeteers. Acting is good enough for a movie like this, atmosphere is nice. There are only few scenes with sfx, so gore is lacking a bit. For bad moviefans this is a good pick, beware that the girl on the sleeve is not in the film at all, though.

Black Emanuelle/White Emanuelle - aka Velluto Nero. According to the plot description Emanuelle (Laura Gemser, also called "Laura" in the film for some strange reason) is dying for a vacation, but what I saw was that she had to do modeling work almost every day. The photographer (husband Gabriele Tinti) goes to extremes for the sessions, forcing her to lay down besides a dog's carcass and to pose between the dead bodies of murdered nomads in the desert. In the meantime you get to see some famous sites in Egypt, a holy man and an old priest both into lots of sex, also of the illegal type, and some family drama involving the daughters of the lady who owns the mansion where most action takes place. One of the more boring Emanuelle films I have seen, not in the least because I couldn't follow about 40% of the film because it was in fast spoken Italian without subs. How they can release DVDs like this is beyond me. If you're in for an Emanuelle film, better pick a different one.

Schizo - aka Schizomaniac aka Playroom. Chris is an archaeologist who survived a massacre when he was child: he lost his parents and his sister that day. Years later, he wants to go back to the location where it happened, because he thinks he might find a hidden tomb there from a prince called Ilok. With a team of four they enter the building and at first everything is all good, but when Chris hits upon a tunnel which he thinks might lead to the tomb, he gets more fanatic by the minute, resulting in him going crazy and turning into a murder machine, in the name of Ilok. The medieval torturemachines look cool, but it's a bit of a shame they only use two. Acting was OK-ish, as was atmosphere. The creature which possesses Chris looked like it had just stepped out of a Charles Band film. Not bad, but certainly not good either.

Truth or Dare: a critical madness - when Tim Ritter (Killing Spree, Creep) was 19 years old, he directed this film and it is quite surprising what a guy can do if he just puts his mind to it. Of course this is not Oscar material or A-level filming, but the effort to make this actually pays off a bit. Imagery looks a bit blocky and bleak, some of the cast clearly had their first job on screen, the sound is sometimes a bit off and low volume, but still it was entertaining somehow. The gore helped, that was pretty well done. The storyline was simple, but because if that it was also not confusing. It's a bout a man finding his wife in bed with his best friend and then going berserk. He ends up in a mnetal institution, but because they have to free some space he is being released, wreaking more havoc among innocent bystanders by playing hardore Truth Or Dare games with them. I was amazed to see a handgrenade could explode a full minute after pulling the pin Overall this is not a very good movie but it is entertaining. Keep in mind it's low budget and you will be fine.

Monster from Bikini Beach - this film is an ode to 50s scifi monsterflicks, but fortunately it shows the monster much more often than those vintage films. The monster in this one is a large half man, half catfish, clawing and biting it's victims covered in the darkness of night. It's targets are usually young girls in bikinis, hence the title. A reporter and a photographer, of the same age as most victims, are digging deep to find out what's causing all dead bodies appearing around town. Meanwhile there is a subplot about a corrupt cop trying to snatch a load of coke from a crime syndicate, and a club owner organising a big go-go dance contest. The reporter and especially the photographer are annoying characters, and the corrupt cop is not very convincing, but still I had good fun watching this. They made some work of the sfx, I saw a bit of cgi blood but most of it was "real", and the guy in the monstersuit was also doing a good job. Keep in mind the 50s scifi monsterflicks and you can have fun watching this one too.

The Devil's Men - a very nice 1977 horror starring Donald Pleasence and Peter Cushing. It has this classic feel all over it, the atmosphere, the acting, the setting: I was exactly in the right mood for this. The story is rather simple: couples keep disappearing in the Greek countryside close to an ancient temple. When new visitors arrive at the house of Father Roche (Pleasence), they also disappear, so he starts to investigate together with an expat who now lives in New York. The priest does the spiritual side and the expat, a cop, the more physical/violent side. Together they form an odd team that goes against a cult led by Baron Corofax (Cushing) and they will try to save the latest people who disappeared before they are being sacrificed to the Minotaur. The cult looks and acts like a satanic cult but actually they are sacrificing and praying to a mythical monster which has some cool fiery effects. If you think clasic horrors are boring, then skip to the final scene where Pleasence does some spritual mumbo jumbo with effects that explode in your face! Recommended, especially for fans of the classics such as Hammer films.

Savage Weekend - on the backside of this DVD it says which goofs to look for, so they actually go for the bad movie vibe. And indeed, the boom mic is visible so often that you might expect it to be on the castlist. The story itself is about a woman going away on a weekend with her sister, with her new husband, with a guy who works for him and with a gay friend. Her ex-husband spends the weekend somewhere else with their son. While she tells her sister that she tries to love her new husband, she still has visions of her ex and flirts around with the local men. The guy who works for the new husband has to help a local dude to build a boat, but after a while he disappears. When the second person is gone, they are wondering what's going on and it takes a little while before they find out that a serial killer is prowling around. Pretty lame film, if it wasn't for the goofs this would have been quite boring.

Horrorvision - this DVD has such a badly designed menu that I couldn't get it to play in my DVD player. Fortunately I have the PC as an alternative player and that worked because I could click on the menu items. The story is about a writer is chatting with Toni (played by Brinke Stevens), who is checking out weird photographs when some sort of virus from the website horrorvision.com hits her and she dies a horrible death. When the virus is about to hit him, his girlfriend tries to save him but she disappears instead: she dissolves into some electrostatic field. The writer wants to find her back, and he gets some help from a weird stranger: together they drive through the entire country to try and solve this problem. Some of the scenes are cool, like the one in the "server room" or the ones with the robotic monsters. Unfortunately, they are mixed with very long and dragging scenes in which they drive, and drive, and drive and meanwhile you're listening to crappy songs. Acting is ok-ish at best, but some "actors" are clearly first timers. J. R. Bookwalter worked on this film with Danny Draven, both names which guarantee some B-movie fun. You can have the fun indeed, but if you're short on time I suggest you ffwd the driving scenes.

Fairy Tales - aka Adult Fairy Tales. A prince becomes 21 years old and thus it's time to produce an heir, if he doesn't do so within a few days, he will lose the kingdom. So he gets sent to a whorehouse where well known characters from fairy tales (such as Snow White) are working, but he can only get it up with the picture of a princess who has disappeared years ago. So the quest is now to find this lost princess on time, and during the quest we get to see lots of nudity. Linnea Quigley stars as the Dream Girl, who is the lost princess who saves the prince in the end. The references to fairy tales were sometimes funny and sometimes a bit vague, but the funniest scenes are the ones with the doorman of the whorehouse who has some really slick lines to sell stuff to passers by. You can have some good laughs with him and his NY accent.

Redneck Zombies - Troma/Full Moon film with the superbasic storyline of a eun of the mill zombieflick. A soldier has to transport a barrel with nuclear waste and of course he loses it and it spills over. The local rednecks make some kind of moonshine out of it so they become flesh eating zombies, who are chasing the hiking group wandering around the area. Effects are nice, story is somewhat lame, but late at night that doesn't matter so much anymore. Ok timefiller, but if you want something refreshing, look for a different film.

Rocktober Blood - slasher with a good opening, an OK ending and a lot of pretty boring mumbo jumbo inbetween. It's about a rocksinger who turns out to be a killer, for some onscure reason he kills his soundman and also a bunch of fans. After this opening, there is a scenechange and we are two years later, the killer has been executed and buried. A girl who used to be the second vocalist has become the lead singer of the band which is now called Head Mistress. She is being haunted by visions of the dead leadsinger though, and it stresses her out, especially because nobody believes her. The middle part is boring, as mentioned before and the only redeeming factor is some nudity from time to time. Near the end it becomes more interesting again, as the band is gonna perform and the singer, back from the dead, is gonna take part. A bloody part, that is. While the film itself was OK, I sat flabbergasted in my chair watching the final 12 minutes of this DVD. This disc came from amazon and it looked purple-ish, just like a copy of a DVD would. When the endcredits are over, you get to see a bunch of interviews with two elderly people, I assumed they were Ferd en Beverly Sebastian, the directors. They start telling about how Jesus saved their lives and was healing people and so on. I totally didn't see that coming! Weirdest ending of a DVD ever imo.

The Monster Squad - kid's movie in horrorstyle with a story about the classic monsters invading a town in the US where a group of boys form the Monsterclub. At first they play out their fantasies, but when they actually see the mummy, Dracula, swamp thing, the Frankenstein monster and Wolfman roam around the streets, they decide to take action. With the help of a man they call "Scary German guy" they try to decipher Van Helsing's diary in order to stop the monsters. In the subplot the parents of the club's leader are having marriage problems: she feels neglected because he is a policeman and thinks about nothing but his work, which has now turned into something really strange with all those monsters wandering around. Not scary at all because this is for kids. I had fun with the sfx, but I was disappointed at the way the horror department was handled. It was too childish and the nods to the genre were not in place for some reason. I can understand that this film holds a lot of nostalgia for some people, but since I saw it first as an adult, I can't share those feelings. I'd say search for a real horror instead.

Hybrid - a Fred Olen Ray film but it's not as bad as he can make them. An experiment goes wrong, and a monstrous reptilian is born/created. It's hiding in the facility where it spawned, and it's exactly this facility that gets chosen as a hideout for a bunch of spacecrewmembers. They can't stay outside because of an approaching ion storm, but the inside is not very safe either, as they soon find out. 1997 wasn't way too late to make yet another Alien rip-off, is what Olen Ray must have thought, so he gives us the slimy alien and the endless wandering through badly lit corridors. Throw in some unnecessary nudity and you have your movie. I had good fun, mostly because of the cliches and the rubbersuit the guy was wearing, but also because of the split second where you get to see the boom mic. Nice waste of time, especially for bad moviefans.

Remakes usually are a disappointment, as they lack the nostalgia factor.

Screamers - watched this in two sessions, as I got a bit too high diring the first watch, so I missed the last 30 minutes. I had already seen Screamers: The Hunting, the sequel which came out much later, and I was glad I got to see this one now. A lot of stuff I already knew, like how the screamers worked, and about the mining corp being at war with the alliance, but it made more sense seeing it in it's original context. Also, both the atmosphere and the acting were much better so I enjoyed this one a whole lot more. Special effects are quite cool, the type thing with the screamers is OK but also a bit cliche, like in many scifi films the question "who is to be trusted?" floats around again. The ending was OK-ish, except for the supercorny outcome with that last screamer, which made me cringe in my seat. Since the rest of the film was so good I forgive the filmmakers for this little crime. Recommended, one of the better scifi films I have seen.

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